How Crash Saved The Oscars

In case you haven’t been following, Oscar night is a week away, and the race is particularly intense this year, featuring two horses that constantly usurp each other for front-runner status.

Out the gate first was Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech, a crowd-pleaser about the titular royal who overcame his stammer to deliver an address in a way that would make Obama proud. Oscar pundits named The King’s Speech the primary Best Picture candidate when it nabbed the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (seemingly the only place where the people’s choice matters).

After that came the critics prizes, which turned things around and crowned The Social Network instead of The King’s Speech. David Fincher’s subtle, cerebral and stylized account of Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to infamy garnered an unprecedented sweep among the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle, and every other journalistic organization from Dallas to St. Louis. Even the Toronto Film Critics Association contradicted its audiences to hail The Social Network the Best Picture, which from there was declared the hands-down winner come Oscar night. Yeah, the film's Golden Globe win registered as a blip on the radar after that.

With the race all but declared, The King’s Speech came back swinging the week Oscar nominations were announced. The prestige pic nabbed a leading 12 nominations (compared to eight for The Social Network) and, in the meantime, it received top honors from the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild and the Screen Actors Guild. These are all heavy indications that The King’s Speech is now the film to beat on February 27th, with The Social Network losing its ground.

What does it all mean? Well, nothing in the grand scheme of things, but for those who are attentive to such ceremony it means a great deal. The fact that The Social Network is still on the tongues of Oscar pundits is a remarkable feat for an Academy that years ago would never have considered such a movie with few likable characters to root for, no grand plot or momentous occasion to hinge on and not even a whiff of romanticism. The Social Network is too smart to pursue such cliched and trivial sentiments, and clearly, Oscar voters are following suit.

So what happened?

Well… Crash.

The Oscars before Crash

Before 2005, a movie like The Social Network would not even have been nominated for the Academy Awards. The Oscars have always favored prestige movies much like The King’s Speech. The winners were usually epic, feel-good stories often based on historical subject matter.

These were the years when Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas, Forrest Gump beat Pulp Fiction and Titanic beat L.A. Confidential. Other winners include sentimental crap like A Beautiful Mind and Million Dollar Baby.

In fact, “Oscar movie” became a widely used adjective to describe films that catered to a taste generally considered classical and safe. Meanwhile, critical darlings like L.A. Confidential, Lost in Translation and Sideways often remained in their own stratosphere.